X-Men Cyclops Goggles – COMPLETE

After what seems like months, finally I’ve found time to photograph and share my X-Men Cyclops goggles, which I created for a costume party. You can catch up with the journey in my last post 3D printing them, or the first one designing them by clicking the links. You can also download these exclusively from Pinshape – just click here!

For the first time, because of the work involved in creating these, and the fact I just think they’re really cool, I’ve put a small price on these at $4.97 to download. To date I’ve given all my models away for free, but at some point it’s important to give value to a design. I’m not interested in making money on these, just to add a sense of value for the time and effort involved in creating something like this, which is designed to print on a small desktop 3D printer like my Up! Plus 2 in 4 pieces. I have designed in special locators to make assembling and gluing very easy, and also nice and strong.

If you have a close look at the design you will probably notice a few interesting things:

The smooth surface finish. This was achieved by spraying multiple coats of a putty undercoat and sanding back to remove the ‘layered’ effect. A final colour was then sprayed on top, with the black details painted by hand. You can see how the layers stood out when the first undercoat was applied in the image below – often these are much less noticeable in the white ABS plastic!

The red visor is not 3D printed – it was cut from a folder and is translucent enough to see out of.

LED’s – yes everything’s better with LED’s! While only glued on roughly, at night, and at the party, they looked pretty awesome (although I felt pretty weird after seeing nothing but red while wearing them!).

Foam was glued into the ear pieces to create a firm fit. As mentioned in my first post designing these, I used a previous 3D scan of my face to get the dimensions right – however knowing that I wanted to share them on a site like Pinshape, I kept the design simple in its details so that it could fit anyone. Obviously we all have differently-shaped heads, so it’s never going to be perfect for everyone, so tweaking the print with something like foam might be necessary. You might also need to scale the print depending on your head size – the critical dimensions are on Pinshape.

Overall this is a really fun design that I hope a few people get some enjoyment from making. Cyclops isn’t the most exciting character in recent movies, but as a kid, I loved watching the cartoon version where he wore these style of goggles. Bring back that version of Cyclops I say! If you make these and wear them to a convention or party, please post images on Pinshape so I can check them out!

I purchased this model and am currently printing it – looks really good so far! I’m worried about the assembly, tho, particularly the join between the lenses – what type of glue did you use? I’m considering using a thin piece of Sintra to span that gap, on the inside, and riveting to hold the two pieces together for more durability, as we are going to use this for a group costume at a convention and the visor is likely to see lots of wear – any suggestions?

Thanks for getting in touch 🙂 I used a simple superglue to join everything together since I printed in ABS – superglue works really well since it actually melts and fuses the plastic together. If you print in PLA or another material you might need to head to a hardware store and get something that works on these materials, there’s heaps of really strong glues used in plumbing that might be useful. I have worn this at a big party, dropped it, thrown it around and had no problems with breaking. Make sure you check out the exploded view on another of my blog posts to help show how it all fits together, there are lots of little tabs to align pieces and help increase gluing surface area https://edditiveblog.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/cyclops-step-1/ . Would love to see your final result, make sure you post some photos on Pinshape or here!!

I printed in NGEN (Amphora), which doesn’t seem to like most adhesives – I’m using epoxy, and will let you know how that works. My printer is actually large enough that I could print the entire model in one go – I don’t suppose you have it as an all-in-one piece model?